The peaked beard of Charles I., so well known from the portraits by Vandyke, introduces us to the troubled times of the Cavaliers and Roundheads. The aversion of the latter to the flowing curls of the Royalists was extreme, and led to the adoption of the Puritanical crop, which, as a mere negation and opposed to every principle of beauty, was doomed in turn to be discarded with ineffable contempt. One would wish to speak with all respect of the stout ironsides who fought at Marston Moor and Naseby; but the silly crusade, encouraged by some of the meaner sort against the beautiful creations of art, has done more to estrange men’s minds from the noble principles they upheld with their swords, than the united acclaim of their preachers could effect in their behalf. The “_love-locks_” of the court gallants were especially hateful to the Puritans. Sometimes a single lock of hair, tied at the end with silk ribbon in bows, was allowed to fall on the chest; others wore two such love-locks, one on each side of the head, which, at times, reached to the waist. Prynne wrote a book expressly against them, on “The Unloveliness of Love-locks;” and in 1643 appeared Dr. Hall’s tract “On the Loathsomeness of Long Hair,” wherein he complained that “some have long lockes at their eares, as if they had four eares, or were prick-eared; some have a little long locke onely before, hanging down to their noses, like the taile of a weasall; every man being made a foole at the barber’s pleasure, or making a foole of the barber for having to make him such a foole.” And in Lyly’s play of Midas, it is asked, “Will you have a low curl on your head, like a ball, or dangling locks, like a spaniel? Your moustachioes sharp at the ends, like a shoemaker’s awl, or hanging down to your mouth, like goats’ flakes? Your love-locks wreathed with a silken twist, or shaggy to fall on your shoulders?” The reader cannot have failed to remark how these love-locks and periwigs facilitated the disguise of one sex for the other, so often assumed by characters in old plays, and on which the chief interest or plot of a piece frequently turned. Thus, when Julia, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” desires her maid, Lucetta, to provide her with “such weeds as may beseem some well-reputed page.” Lucetta answers, “Why, then, your ladyship must cut your hair.” JULIA.--No, girl; I’ll knit it up in silken strings, With twenty odd conceited true-love knots: To be fantastic, may become a youth Of greater time than I shall show to be. A periwig favored the escape of the Duke of York, afterwards James II., from St. James’s Palace in 1648, who luckily “shifted into gentlewoman’s clothes,” got on board a Dutch vessel below Gravesend, and landed safely in Holland. The hostess at Middleburgh, where the prince slept by the way, wondered much that “the young gentlewoman would not let the maids help her to bed.”